Keyword: ussr

Vladimir Putin has an army of professional trolls running thousand of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts to flood social media with pro-Russia propaganda. Hundreds of workers are paid £500 a month to work exhausting 12-hour shifts bombarding the internet with comments placing Putin in a more favourable light. The trolls work under strict condition which see them banned from talking and even forging friendships with one another.

If you believe that the U.S. aggressors were preparing to land in Crimea in the winter of 2014 in order to help the Ukrainians kill all the Orthodox Russians there, and that only the pre-emptive military operation under the command of President Vladimir Putin saved them, then you are "one of us" — that is, a true-blue adherent of the state's cult. However, if you think that the United States was not planning a military operation in Crimea last year, that it did not "have its eye on" the peninsula and that NATO never did and still has no plans...

Earlier this week, 47 Republican senators published an open letter informing the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal with the United States that failed to be approved by the Senate would likely expire in 2017, once President Barack Obama’s term ended. You can read the full letter here. The letter enraged progressives, who immediately began accusing the senators of treason for having the audacity to publish basic constitutional facts about how treaties work. (snip) If these progressives want to know what actual treason looks like, they should consult liberal lion Ted Kennedy, who not only allegedly sent secret messages...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has stirred controversy after paying tribute to a monument complex to Soviet soldiers killed in Hungary during the suppression of the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising. Hungary's law states that the present day freedom ‘blossomed' out of that uprising also known as the ‘1956 revolution' and anyone ‘justifying the crimes committed by the communist system is to be punished'. This means that Putin's commemoration of the soldiers violates Hungarian law. Despite government officials denying that Putin laid a wreath at the monument specifically commemorating Soviet invaders, an advance of the itinerary of Putin's visit said that he would...

The first man in outer space 50 years ago believed fervently in the Almighty — even though the atheistic Soviet government put famous words in his mouth that he had looked around at the cosmos and did not see God. Mankind’s first space flight lasted 108 minutes on April 12, 1961. It was the height of the Cold War. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was proclaimed by the Soviet leadership to have announced, “I went up to space, but I didn’t encounter God.” However, he never uttered those often-quoted words, says a close friend. And it seems that the Soviet Union lied...

I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them. [...] If we wanted to eat, we learned at a very young age that we had to stand in long lines every day, often in bitter cold at 4 a.m. in hopes that the store would not run out of bread or milk by the time we made it to the...

For twenty years now, the Western politicians, journalists, businessmen, and academics who observe and describe the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all followed the same narrative. We begin with the assumption that the Soviet Union ended in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over power to Boris Yeltsin and Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the Soviet republics became independent states. We continue with an account of the early 1990s, an era of “reform,” when some Russian leaders tried to create a democratic political system and a liberal capitalist economy. We follow the trials and tribulations of the reformers, analyze...

Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Obama and politicians in both countries have been trading barbs for months as the countries' relations have plunged ever southward. But what about the countries' citizens? Are they as at odds as their leaders' rhetoric suggests? WorldViews delved into recent opinion polls conducted by the Pew Research Center and Gallup. Together, the data provide interesting insights into what Russians and Americans think about each other and themselves, how they differ in certain ways, and how they are similar when it comes to other aspects. Ways Americans and Russians think differently Less than half of all...

[T]he suppression of the minority of exploiters, by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday, is a matter comparatively so easy, simple, and natural that it will cost far less bloodshed… and will cost mankind far less. Lenin wrote this in The State and Revolution . In the end, 66 million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1959: tortured, shot, starved, frozen or worked to death. This figure was calculated by Professor of Statistics I. A. Kurganov and quoted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago . Others say that the figure is 45 million,...

Viorel Florescu/staff photographer Retired Washington Township math teacher Miriam Moskowitz, 98, leaving federal court in New York City on Thursday with Caren Ponty, left, and her nephew Ira Moskowitz, after U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled against her petition to reverse her 1950 felony conviction related to atomic espionage. Miriam Moskowitz has been called a lot of things in her 98 years of life — feisty, aggressive and possessing a violent temper, among them. But the one label that bothers her most is spy for the former Soviet Union — a moniker given to her by the government. That...

A new report out of Europe says that Russian military confrontations and "near misses" with NATO nations have seen a dramatic uptick in 2014. It warns that Russia must reevaluate its military policy and that NATO and Russia must improve communications to avoid potentially catastrophic confrontations. The report, released today by the European Leadership Network (ELN), a British think tank focused on regional security, chronicles some 40 incidents over eight months in which Russian military forces committed "violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided mid-air collisions, close encounters at sea, and other dangerous actions" across Europe and near North...

Winston Churchill urged the United States to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union to win the Cold War, a newly released document reveals. The previously unseen memorandum from the FBI archives details how Britain’s wartime leader made his views known to a visiting American politician in 1947. Churchill believed a pre-emptive strike on Stalin’s Russia might be the only way to stop Communism conquering the West. The note, written by an FBI agent, reports that Churchill urged Right-wing Republican Senator Styles Bridges to persuade President Harry Truman to launch a nuclear attack which would ‘wipe out’ the Kremlin...

The man responsible for what the military called the Navy’s biggest betrayal is dead. John Anthony Walker, the former Senior Warrant Officer from Norfolk who supplied the Soviets with damaging tactical and military data, died in federal prison on Thursday in Butner, North Carolina. 29 years ago, Walker’s career as a spy came to an end in Norfolk Federal Court.

The Admiral Nakhimov heavy cruiser is to receive new ordnance, putting it ahead of the Russian fleet’s current flagship, the Peter the Great missile cruiser. Military sources say the installation of the new long-range S-400 and Poliment-Redut anti-aircraft missile systems, part of the modernization of the Russian fleet, will not change the ship's combat missions. Heavy nuclear missile-bearing cruiser Admiral Nakhimov in the Barents Sea. Source: Oleg Lastochkin / RIA Novosti Russia’s Admiral Nakhimov nuclear cruiser is to receive the new long-range S-400 and the middle-range Poliment-Redut anti-missile systems, as well as Caliber cruise missiles, as part of the ongoing...

The Ebola disinformation surfaced in a Liberian newspaper on September 9, 2014, in a letter by an American professor. The “Dear World citizens” column, by Dr. Cyril Broderick, has since been picked up by various Internet sites and “news” organizations, including Alex Jones’ Infowars, Global Research, Iranian Press TV, Information Clearing House, and something called 21st Century Wire. Labeled by some critics as the “nutty professor” and a crackpot, the professor’s “research profile” claims he is president of the International Society of African Scientists. Other local and regional sources, such as “Face 2 Face Africa,” described as “The Premier Pan-African...

Russia’s leaders have continued to criticize the economic sanctions imposed by the West over their invasion of Ukraine, but the official complaints from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have recently taken a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone. The sanctions, Lavrov and others suggest, won’t really hurt the Russian economy in the long term, but are damaging to international cooperation in general. Related Stories Moody's cuts Russia's sovereign rating by one notch to Baa2 MarketWatch Russia warns of ‘prolonged’ period of cold relations with U.S. Fortune [$$] Russia's Debt Downgraded The Wall Street Journal Russia's Investment Grade Status Teeters On Edge Following Moody's Downgrade Forbes...

Soviet Agent Award for Mother Jones Reporter Cliff Kincaid — April 12, 2013 David Corn, the liberal writer and MSNBC analyst who based a story about Republican Senator Mitch McConnell on a secret and possibly illegal tape recording, is scheduled to accept an award named for Soviet agent of influence I.F. Stone. The identification of Stone as a Soviet agent is not in serious dispute, except among his most loyal and sycophantic followers.Equally scandalous, Corn is being presented the award by Jeff Cohen, who has started a petition through his radical organization, RootsAction, to give accused traitor Bradley Manning the...

It was the most notorious spy case of the Cold War — the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union — and it rested largely on the testimony of Ms. Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, an Army sergeant who had stolen nuclear intelligence from Los Alamos, N.M. For his role in the conspiracy, Mr. Greenglass went to prison for almost a decade, then changed his name and lived quietly until a journalist tracked him down. He admitted then, nearly a half-century later, that he had lied on the witness stand to save...

Russia is currently in the process of expanding and modernizing its navy. This might have something to do with Moscow’s apparent appetite for military conquest — although Russia also has a few nuclear submarines that are dangerously past their prime, considering the fissile materials that are still stored onboard. In 2009, one rusted behemoth was transported to a factory in the far eastern port city of Vladivostok, close to the Korean peninsula, for decommissioning. With the vessel fully out of water, the pictures offer an amazing perspective on how massive and complex even an outdated class of nuclear submarine really...

Vulgar chants about Vladimir Putin before he arrived for a regional summit in Belarus did not augur well for the Russian president's hopes of bringing the leaders of former Soviet republics closer together. Matters got even worse when bickering broke out at the start of the meeting, revealing fault lines over the Ukraine crisis and deepening doubts about the future of the loose grouping known as the Commonwealth of Independent States. Jibes between Putin and the leader of Moldova, and barbs aimed at the absent Ukrainian leader, raised new questions about his ability to woo countries to the Eurasian Economic...

Designers competing to create an aircraft that could directly support troops on the battlefield were hampered by the weight of the ‘flying tank’, low air speed and flimsy protection. The Il-2 was the answer to these challenges. One of the key lessons of the First World War was that the airplane had a crucial role to play in effective military campaigns in the new era. With this in mind, in the 1920s and 1930s Europe’s leading nations expended significant efforts and resources on developing new aircraft that could be used to provide support for infantry and tanks. The Soviet Union...

Strange thing about Flood Wall Street, the financial-district protest that followed the People’s Climate March: Nobody had much to say about the climate — what they came to talk about was capitalism. “Stop Capitalism,” “End Capitalism,” “Capitalism Kills,” the placards read. Kshama Sawant, the socialist Seattle city-council member who funds her crusade against capitalism by being married to a man with Microsoft money, called for a “radical, militant” movement linking environmental concerns to such traditional socialist enterprises as heavy government intervention into targeted industries, including energy and transportation. Question: What happened to the environment the last time people with radically...

WARSAW (Reuters) - More than 200 Polish miners blocked trains carrying Russian coal at a border passage in northern Poland to protest against the cheaper Russian coal being brought in at a time when local mines are struggling, mining union leaders said on Wednesday. Poland, which uses coal to generate about 90 percent of its electricity, produced 76.5 million tonnes in 2013. It exported 10.6 million tonnes but at the same time imported 10.8 million, mainly from Russia and the Czech Republic. Imported coal proves cheaper than that from Poland's largest miners such as Kompania Weglowa or JSW. Faced with...

Famed Russian musician and leader of the soviet rock band "The Time Machine" Andrei Makarevich has introduced a new song named ‘My country has gone mad.’ The anti-war song was presented during the open studio show ‘Echo of Moscow’ in Moscow’s Gogol Boulevard. The musician has already become the center of a Kremlin witch hunt for his anti-war position. Makarevich openly opposes the illegal annexation of Crimea and Russian aggression aimed at Ukraine. After performing a concert in Donbas in support of the liberation of Slovyansk from Kremlin-backed insurgents, Makarevich suffered severe criticism and persecution in his home country.

The MiG-29 Fulcrum outside the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has a hornet’s nest growing in its nose. Its tires, lifted off the ground by stands, are split and shredded. Bird droppings drool off its radome. The aircraft gives the impression of a war prize displayed like a head on a stake. In a way, it is a war prize, taken in the winning of the cold war. It’s one of 17 MiG-29s the U.S. government purchased from the former Soviet state of Moldova in 1997, a deal that kept the jets from...

Russia has banned fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, milk and dairy imports from the US, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Norway. Dmitry Medvedev said the ban was effective immediately and would last for one year. The agriculture minister, Nikolai Fyodorov, said on Thursday that greater quantities of Brazilian meat and New Zealand cheese would be imported to offset the newly prohibited items. He added Moscow was in talks with Belarus and Kazakhstan to prevent the banned western foodstuffs being exported to Russia from the two countries. The Kremlin's move comes in response to the grounding of the budget airline subsidiary...

Russia could ask its richest citizens to help foot the bill for the annexation of Crimea by paying a "solidarity tax" proposed by a group of lawmakers. Deputies from the State Duma lower house of parliament, which is dominated by backers of President Vladimir Putin, have drawn up a draft law that would increase income tax for people earning more than more than 1 million roubles ($28,700) a month. It would affect less than 2 percent of the working population but the amounts could be huge for some individuals because the daft proposes they pay up to 30 percent of...

Perhaps chess champions who escaped from the old Soviet Union can give us better history lessons than academic historians. “Sometimes I joke that if guys like Barack Obama and David Cameron had been in power in the 1980s, I would still be playing chess for the Soviet Union,” Garry Kasparov said at a Cato Institute dinner in May. garry kasparov By way of contrast, Kasparov observed that “Ronald Reagan had two things more recent free world leaders lack: principles and the credibility only principles can provide.” At the Cato Institute dinner, he took note of some recent trends in this...

When we talk about combat aircraft that are so ugly they are brutishly beautiful, aircraft like the A-10, B-52 and the Mi-24 come to mind. Yet an obscure Russian close air support aircraft that lost a competition to the now notorious Sukhoi Su-25 may take the trophy for the must gorgeously ugly combat jet of all time. By the late 1960s Russia was looking for a new jet aircraft that would be dedicated to close air support (CAS). After studying close air support scenarios and data collected since WWII it was clear that the fast, swept-wing jets and heavy bombers...

Former Soviet minister and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, who is credited with helping end the Cold War, died Monday after a long illness, his spokeswoman tells the media. To remind you of the former leader's career, NPR's Corey Flintoff has this report for our Newscast unit: "White-haired and dapper, Eduard Shevardnadze was the face of Soviet foreign policy during the era when President Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting to liberalize the Communist bloc. "He was admired by counterparts in the West — but many Russians came to blame him, along with Gorbachev, for the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. "Shevardnadze...

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday said Hillary Clinton’s recent comments comparing his actions to those of Adolf Hitler are a sign of weakness, saying she “has never been too graceful” in her public statements. Putin was asked if he thought "it would be worse if you were meeting with Hillary Clinton" given the former secretary of state's rhetoric. "I think even in this case we could reach an agreement," Putin said. "When people push boundaries too far, it's not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman.

Presidents of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia sign historic agreement establishing the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union, a EU-like economic zone that resembles more the old USSR. Eurasian Economic Union to Restore USSR The New American 04 June 2014 On May 29, 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian and Kazakh counterparts, Alexander Lukashenko and Nursultan Nazarbayev, met at the Kazakh capital, Astana, where they signed a treaty creating the Eurasian Economic Union, comprising Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Russian Federation. “The just-signed treaty is of epoch-making, historic importance,” Vladimir Putin said. According to Putin, the new treaty will...

For the 21st consecutive quarter the US economy has failed to live up to the Obama Administration’s promised improvement. The revised GDP for the January-March period of 2014 showed a 1% decline. The vaunted recovery from the “Great Recession” remains elusive. Jason Furman, Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, attributed the decline in GDP to “bad weather,” which he blamed on “GOP resistance to the President’s efforts to curb global climate change.” “In one sense, bad weather can just be bad luck,” Furman suggested. “The Soviet economy was hammered year-after-year by an incredible streak of bad weather from...

(Reuters) - Lech Walesa, head of the Solidarity movement that ended Communism in Poland, knelt in prayer on Friday at a Catholic funeral mass for General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Communist leader who for decades was his sworn enemy.

Moscow is banning Washington from using Russian-made rocket engines, which the US has used to deliver its military satellites into orbit, said Russia’s Deputy PM, Dmitry Rogozin, who is in charge of space and defense industries. According to Rogozin, Russia is also halting the operation of all American GPS stations on its territory from June 1. DETAILS TO FOLLOW

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia staged a huge May Day parade on Moscow's Red Square for the first time since the Soviet era on Thursday, with workers holding banners proclaiming support for President Vladimir Putin after the seizure of territory from neighboring Ukraine. Thousands of trade unionists marched with Russian flags and flags of Putin's ruling United Russia party onto the giant square beneath the Kremlin walls, past the red granite mausoleum of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin. Many banners displayed traditional slogans for the annual workers' holiday, like: "Peace, Labour, May". But others were more directly political, alluding to the...

A 007-style of mission to capture a Mig-21 in the 1960s. Built in more than 11,000 examples and acquired by countless countries around the globe, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 was introduced in several Arab arsenals in the early 1960s, becoming the most modern among the Soviet jets flown in the Middle East in that period. After it entered the active service, Israelis feared that the Fishbed was superior to the Mirage III fighter jets hence they needed as much details about it as possible to assess its capabilities since any information about this new fighter could give to the Israeli Air...

US troops arriving in Eastern Europe. Is it more than symbolic? A contingent of 150 US troops began arriving in Poland Wednesday, the first of four such units being deployed for training exercises in Eastern Europe in a move criticized as unlikely to impress Russia. By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer / April 23, 2014 Washington The Pentagon is sending a contingent of 150 US troops to Poland this week, the first piece of what US officials describe as an effort to reassure Eastern European allies that the United States has their back in the wake of Russian aggression. The contingent,...

People who see the world through the lens of domestic politics label ObamaCare as Barack Obama’s signature achievement. They are wrong. Obama has had a much greater, and more ominous achievement in the geopolitical arena. What did Obama really have in mind when he told Medvedev that after his re-election he would have greater flexibility? As he assumed office, the world was uni-polar and the US was the sole superpower. Five years into his Presidency, Iraq is reverting to sectarian warfare and becoming an Iranian client state. Afghanistan is slipping away as fast as American troops are leaving. Egypt was...

MOSCOW, April 21. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree on rehabilitation of Crimean Tatars and other nationalities of Crimea, who were victims of Stalin-era repressions. “Taking advantage of an opportunity, I would like to inform colleagues that I have signed a decree on rehabilitation of the Crimean Tatars, the Armenian population, Germans, Greeks - all those who suffered from Stalin’s repressions,” Putin said. Other Crimean ethnic groups repressed by Stalin would also be rehabilitated, he said, listing Armenians, Germans and Greeks among them in a move reaching out to some 250,000 mainly Sunnite Tatars in a modern...

Here Are The Two Soviet Propaganda Posters Hanging In The White House Press Secretary's Home Washingtonian MOM magazine's spring issue has a profile of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's wife, ABC News contributor Claire Shipman, that features a picture taken inside their home. In the background of the photo, you can see two framed Soviet-era propaganda posters. One of Carney's posters is a version of this iconic design by artist Dmitry Moor with a soldier pointing his finger alongside text that says "Have YOU Enlisted?" in Russian: The other poster features a female factory worker. According to this eBay...

A group of MPs representing both majority and opposition parties have asked Russia’s Prosecutor General to probe the events leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union. They view possible action against former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In the letter, signed by two MPs from United Russia, two Communists and one representative of populist nationalist party LDPR, the parliamentarians claim that at the March 1991referendum the majority of Soviet citizens voted that their country should remain united, and therefore the actions of several top officials that led to USSR breakup were unlawful. They also noted that in November 1991 the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Monday warned Russian President Vladimir Putin against moving "overtly or covertly" into eastern Ukraine and said there was strong evidence that pro-Russian demonstrators in the region were being paid.

A secret package arrived at CIA headquarters in January 1958. Inside were two rolls of film from British intelligence — pictures of the pages of a Russian-language novel titled “Doctor Zhivago.” The book, by poet Boris Pasternak, had been banned from publication in the Soviet Union. The British were suggesting that the CIA get copies of the novel behind the Iron Curtain. The idea immediately gained traction in Washington.

An interesting simulation of 1962 America. A bit hokey, and also that the simulated broadcast comes from Dayton, OH, home of Wright-Patterson Air Force base, and would have been one of the first places on the mark for a soviet nuclear attack, I believe it echoes the times.

The coexistence of "Palestinian" Arabs and Moscow started from a lie, which will be ever-present in the propaganda of so-called Palestinian cause. As former American intelligence service’s expert James Hansen emphasized in his book, Soviets advertised “cause of Palestinian guerilla groups” using untruths about “the battles between the Israelis and Palestians”. In late 1968, publicity was apparent in the Soviet press over the cause of the Palestinian guerrilla groups. This publicity was coupled with exaggerated numbers of Israeli casualties and nonexistent battles between the Israelis and Palestinians.

President Vladimir Putin launched a program to improve the physical fitness of Russians on Monday, using funds from the Winter Olympics to revive a Soviet-era plan. Speaking at a meeting with officials in the Kremlin, Putin said that reinstating the plan, first introduced in the 1930s under Joseph Stalin and known in Russia by the acronym GTO, would “pay homage to our national historical traditions”. […] Putin frequently harks back to the Soviet era to appeal to nostalgic Russians. …

Leadership comes in many forms and with many levels of risk, but history gives us a few moments when leaders stood alone and were proven right. [...] In late June 1948 the Soviets cut all road, rail and water access to Berlin, a city controlled by the Western Allies yet surrounded by Soviet-controlled territories. The Soviet’s goal: take Berlin from the Allies by forcing the US-UK-French alliance into one of two options: try to protect a city of 2.1 million starving Germans, or war. The Soviets expected the West to surrender the city quickly. [...] The US was in the...

Simferopol, Crimea (CNN) -- Is Russian President Vladimir Putin an opportunist, grabbing at chances to poke the West in the eye, or a clever strategist with the longer-term goal of restoring a greater Russia? Is he simply riding a tide of Russian patriotic fervor over Crimea? Is he a rational actor aware of the delicate balances within the international system, or as one observer put it, "drunk on power" and oblivious to sanctions? These are the questions preoccupying western governments and Russia's neighbors, after the swift annexation of Crimea and Russian military maneuvers close to the Ukrainian border. There were...